Apple M1 vs AMD Ryzen 7 7736U vs Apple M1 Pro 8-Core

Apple M1

The Apple M1 is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2020 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac Mini. It offers 8 cores divided in four performance cores and four power-efficiency cores. The big cores offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 12 MB shared L2 cache. According to Apple the performance of these cores should be better than anything on the market (in late 2020). The four efficiency cores are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3204 MHz.

The M1 is available in two TDP variants, a passive cooled 10 Watt variant for the MacBook Air and an active cooled faster variant for the MacBook Pro 13 and Mac Mini. Those should offer a better-sustained performance according to Apple.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 offers 8 cores (7 cores in the entry MacBook Air) and a peak performance of 2.6 teraflops. Apple claims that it is faster than any other iGPU at the time of announcement.

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine with a peak performance of 11 TOPS (for AI hardware acceleration), a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt / USB 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders.

The Apple M1 includes 16 billion transistors (up from the 10 billion of the A12Z Bionic and therefore double the amount of a Tiger Lake-U chip like the i7-1185G7) and is manufactured in 5nm at TSMC.

AMD Ryzen 7 7736U

The AMD Ryzen 7 7736U is a processor for mid-sized laptops based of the Rembrandt refresh generation. The R7 7736U integrates all eight cores based on the Zen 3+ microarchitecture. They are clocked at 2.7 (guaranteed base clock) to 4.75 GHz (Turbo) and support SMT / Hyperthreading (16 threads). The chip is manufactured on the modern 6 nm TSMC process. Compared to the previous Ryzen 7 6800U, the 7736U offers the same specs and a slightly higher possible TDP of 15-28W (vs 15-25W). The 7736U is a special version for HP of the Ryzen 7 7735U / Ryzen 7 6800U.

The Zen 3+ is a refresh of the Zen 3 architecture and should not offer a lot of changes. The chip offers modern features, like support for USB 4 (40 Gbps), PCI-E Gen 4 and DDR5-4800MT/s or LPDDR5-6400MT/s.

The performance should be similar to the old Ryzen 7 6800U due to the same specifications. The Ryzen 7 R7 7735U should be in theory a bit higher due to the 50 MHz higher boost clock.

The integrated GPU Radeon 680M is still one of the fastest iGPUs (only bested by the new Radeon 780M). It is based on the RDNA2 architecture and offers 12 CUs at up to 2.2 GHz.

The Ryzen 7736U is manufactured in 6nm FinFET at TSMC.

Apple M1 Pro 8-Core

The Apple M1 Pro 8-Core is a System on a Chip (SoC) from Apple that is found in the late 2021 MacBook Pro 14 and 16-inch models. It offers 8 cores from the 10 available in the chip divided in six performance cores (P-cores with 600 - 3220 MHz) and four power-efficiency cores (E-cores with 600 - 2064 MHz). The cores are similar to the cores in the Apple M1.

The big cores (codename Firestorm) offer 192 KB instruction cache, 128 KB data cache, and 24 MB shared L2 cache (up from 12 MB in the M1). The four efficiency cores (codename Icestorm) are a lot smaller and offer only 128 KB instruction cache, 64 KB data cache, and 4 MB shared cache. Finally, the SoC includes 16 MB System Level Cache shared by the GPU. The efficiency cores (E cluster) clock with 600 - 2064 MHz, the performance cores (P cluster) with 600 - 3228 MHz.

The unified memory (16 or 32 GB LPDDR5-6400) next to the chip is connected by a 256 bit memory controller and can be used by the GPU and CPU.

The integrated graphics card in the M1 Pro offers 14 cores (of the 16 cores in the chip).

Furthermore, the SoC integrates a fast 16 core neural engine, a secure enclave (e.g., for encryption), a unified memory architecture, Thunderbolt 4 controller, an ISP, and media de- and encoders (including ProRes).

The M1 Pro is manufactured in 5 nm at TSMC and integrates 33.7 billion transistors. The peak power consumption of the chip was advertised around 30W for CPU intensive tasks.